There are many types of electrical systems that benefit from electrical isolation. Galvanic isolation is a principle of isolating functional sections of electrical systems to prevent current flow, meaning that no direct electrical conduction path is permitted between different functional sections. As one example, certain types of electronic equipment require that high-voltage components (e.g., 1 kV or greater) interface with low-voltage components (e.g., 10V or lower). Examples of such equipment include medical devices and industrial machines that utilize high-voltage in some parts of the system, but have low-voltage control electronics elsewhere within the system. The interface of the high-voltage and low-voltage sides of the system relies upon the transfer of data via some mechanism other than electrical current.
Other types of electrical systems such as signal and power transmission lines can be subjected to voltage surges by lightning, electrostatic discharge, radio frequency transmissions, switching pulses (spikes), and perturbations in power supply. These types of systems can also benefit from electrical isolation.
Electrical isolation can be achieved with a number of different types of devices. Some examples of isolation products include galvanic isolators, optocouplers, inductive, and capacitive isolators. Previous generations of electronic isolators used two chips in a horizontal configuration with wire bonds between the chips. These wire bonds provided a coupling point for large excursions in the difference between the grounds of the systems being isolated. These excursions can be on the order of 25,000 V/usec.
As mentioned above, electrical isolation can be achieved with capacitive, inductive isolators, optical, and/or RF isolators to transmit data across an isolation boundary. There is a desire to add more optical channels to optical couplers in an attempt to meet the complex functionality requirements for various applications. However, there are concerns with respect to chip space utilization and chip pin utilization. Simply adding more channels to an optical coupler will increase package size and/or pin counts, which translates to a larger footprint on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB), which is generally undesirable in end products. It is a challenge to incorporate additional features into an existing number of channels already established in an optocoupler package.